Little monsters vol 1 by Jeff LemIre

Illustrated by Dustin Nguyen

Eight young children play amidst destroyed buildings and derelict cars that spell out with certainty an apocalypse they all lived through. Some doodle on the buildings, others strum guitars. All of them are vampires. A few find rodents to eat, but then, they smell something they've never encountered before - a human - and it starts to make them salivate. A few of them attack the human and taste blood that is more delicious than anything they've had before, so they continue to hunt for more humans. Half of the group is reluctant to leave the city and disobey their creators, but the others can never go back to draining rats again.

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This story has a bit of a slow build to it compared to other Lemire/Nguyen projects, but patient readers will be rewarded with some wonderful twists and turns. Lemire does give away a fair amount of information to the reader that the characters don't always know, so this creates an air of anticipation that will most likely pay off in future volumes. This first volume does leave off on a very nasty cliffhanger, and comics always have an awful wait time til the next volume.

Anyone familiar with Nguyen's illustrations will see some repeated themes from some of his other works, but the color palette with this title is very different than his other works. Most of the page is in grayscale, but there are specific points where the color red is used to really draw attention to those panels. 

There is a fair amount of violence and death on the page, and a lot of blood given the subject matter.

Sara's Rating: 8/10
Suitability Level: Grades 10-12

Publisher: Image Comics
Publication Date: October 11, 2022
ISBN: 9781534323186 (Paperback)

​Tags: Rating: 8/10, Suitability: High School, Comicbooks, Horror, Supernatural, Dystopian, Family, ​Image Comics